Getting Down to Big Business: A Conservative American Romance

Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America,

Yesterday,
for the first of three posts on the romance between business and the
political right, I wrote about what some historians call “the golden age
of capitalism,” which, as far as our governmental arrangements are
concerned, was also a golden age of liberalism. In the years after World
War II, coincident with America’s decades-long economic boom, even the
nation’s top corporate executives seemed to buy into the Keynesian
consensus that the best way to assure their own firms’ prosperity was to
put money in the pockets of ordinary Americans.

Then, suddenly, they didn’t—my subject for today.

Here’s an irony of the history of conservatism’s relationship with
business and business’s relationship with conservatism: “Wall Street”
used to be the right-wing industrialists of the forties and fifties’
greatest term of derision. (Wall Street was the place that humiliated
them by forcing them, hat in hand, to beg for capital.) Phyllis Schlafly
wrote of the “Wall Street kingmakers” who controlled the Republican
Party like dictators, forcing on it “liberal” nominees (like the
financier Wendell Willkie), the kind of people who read the liberal
Republican flagship organ the New York Herald-Tribune. Wall
Street liked Lyndon Johnson. It tolerated unions. And, as long as the
postwar boom was still booming, it accepted business’s relatively
subordinate role in federal policy making. Which of course drove the
1950s and ’60s versions of Tea Partiers—I’ve called them “Manionites.”